Digital recordings made in London
(at the Conway Hall without an audience)
by Martin Davidson - 2001 June 4
Total time 56:27

All previously unissued

Excerpts from sleeve notes:

"Cage found that in order to be a contributing world citizen, he had, with
artifice and discipline, to continually reinvent the 'gift' that life's brutality
always threatens to eradicate, the gift of good-humored openness to constructive
possibility." - Joan Retallack on John Cage.

It is easy to despair in a time of deepening world crisis, when unrestrained
capitalism is reaching its ugly zenith, when corporations have hoodwinked governments
to the extent that the pursuit of profit wins out over common sense, when the lessons
of foreign policy are not heeded but the lunacy is repeated and our very environment
is under immediate terminal threat.

Sometimes it's easy to forget that there are women and men of goodwill the world
over who are working for change in infinitely varied ways. Returning to improvised
music such as this CD is like returning to a non-religious spiritual touchstone.
The musicians come together and ask, "Where are we now?" and take it from there.
There is an unmediated honesty, acceptance and openess. These are some of the unspoken
principles of improvised music. And its practitioners do the essential job of reminding
us that another world is not just possible but actual.

The recording on this CD was only the third occasion that these three musicians
had played together as a trio (though some of them have worked together in different
configurations). The first occasion was in autumn 2000 when they played in Maggie
Nicols' front room and the second was a concert performance at the Freedom of the
City festival in May 2001. The pieces on the CD are in the order they were played
with only a little editing between tracks.

The recording is more intimate than a concert yet retains an openness. There
is an awareness of the space, and an awareness of a fourth life present since Caroline
was six months pregnant at the time with her son Clement.

Individually each of the three musicians pursues distinct artist endeavours.
Charlotte's solo work explores the performance potential of unusual spaces from
sound-proofed S&M dungeons to subterranean Roman Baths; Caroline's emphasises
the uniqueness of live performance whether with her group of 20 female saxophone
players, Mass Producers, or her one-woman mixed-media performance pieces; and Maggie
has a long and rich association with improvised music and workshop projects which
explore the liberating, empowering and transformative potential of improvised music.

Together, the three voices - two instrumental voices and Nicols, who uses her
voice as an instrument, subsuming herself in the instrumental interplay - abandon
the preconceived and tap into the directness of the pre-verbal. That's also the
key for entering this music as a listener: abandoning preconceptions and mediating
thought in order to hear the music directly.

The acoustics of the Conway Hall proved to be a good choice. This simple,
medium-sized, wood-clad hall with a stage and seated gallery has a long history
of involvement with improvised music. Besides many one-off concerts, the London
Musicians' Collective held its Annual Festival of Experimental Music there from
1991-1996. Last year a new festival, Freedom of the City, started up focusing
specifically on improvised music from London.

Appropriately perhaps, the hall is owned by the London branch of the British
Humanist Association whose ethic is morality without religion, and belief in human
potential. Above the stage is the Shakespearean aphorism "To Thine Own Self Be True".

Now, where were we?

PHIL ENGLAND (2002)

Excerpts from reviews:

"TRANSITIONS deliciously twists, if not disfigures the old bromides
about instrumentalists having a voice, and vocalist having an instrument, as Maggie
Nicols, Caroline Kraabel, and Charlotte Hug are all capable of producing such
unconventional sounds that their origins are obscured. It is gratifying to hear
Nicols in tandem with two of the more promising beneficiaries of her pioneering
work. As such, TRANSITIONS is an album of freely improvised music that
bucks stereotypes on several levels.

Much of the music, were it scored, could be marked p; rarely does it
rise above a conversational volume, even when the comity that pervades their
improvisations is supplanted by vaguely volatile forces. This allows Hug's string
rubbing and scraping, Kraabel's breathy timbres, and Nicols' gasps, moans and
coos to mingle without loss of detail: give the assist to Martin Davidson's
no-frills engineering and the acoustics of an audience-less Conway Hall.

Still, there is nothing bucolic about the music. For the most part, there is
no suspense in a dramatic sense; but several of the pieces, nevertheless, convey
the nerve of free improvisation, as the impulses and the mitigation of impulses
by the respective musicians take on a collective shape. This is not to say that
the set has no broad moments; in what may be an unprecedented moment in improvised
music, perhaps undertaken with tongue in firmly implanted in cheek, Nicols'
expletives are momentarily bleeped on No Now. Neither Kraabel nor Hug shy
away from a visceral attack when it is neede, as well. .

TRANSITIONS may well be an album that musicians and commentators point
to years from now as a milestone."

BILL SHOEMAKER - JAZZREVIEW 2002

"Surprisingly TRANSITIONS is only the third time these three women
have performed together. Surprising because they perform with such elegant precision
that it is difficult to believe they have not been playing together all their
lives, or at least for many years. These seven pieces are distinguished as some
of the finest music of the genre. There is sensitivity and softness, tempered
by an approach that eschews limits so that surprises abound. The fundamental sound
of Nicol's remarkable voice plus alto sax and viola works on several levels. At
times the instruments seem like props for the voice, but most of the time there
is an egalitarian process, where all three merge as one. The ranges of all three
are similar, too, weaving lines that meld and then unravel mysteriously. On
Undercurrents, Nicols cries like a wounded cat, and moans like a woman
giving birth, while on the incredible Hymn Indoors, there is a simplicity
that reflects a mesmerising commixture of blurred vibrations. This is serious
free improvisation, with roots digging back to the 1960s, but it retains fresh,
vivifying, and uplifting qualities based on constant changes and disruptions.
It is hard to believe that the sounds were created by only three persons; the
complexity, diversity, and pristine beauty of the product signal a hearty embrace
of the non-commercial, while pure exhilaration fills the recording."

STEVEN LOEWY - CADENCE 2002

"There are not enough women in free improvisation. Coming across an
all-female trio like this one, the statistic becomes a burden: we need
more women in free improvisation! It would probably be cliché to write about the
special sensibility and sensuality they bring to the genre, something no man can
emulate, but the fact remains that this session between vocalist Maggie Nicols,
saxophonist Caroline Kraabel and viola player Charlotte Hug is pure gold and that
one wishes there were more like it to go around. The acoustics of the Conway Hall
apply extra lustre over the seven pieces. The three musicians move like a three-headed
entity, but Nicols' distinctive voice tends to lead them. Not that she shuts out
input from the other two, but her 'voice' is the most distinctive of the group
and it acts like a pied piper. The highlight is Hymn Indoors, incredibly
synergistic and rapturing - this track should never end, mostly because of Hug's
microtonal textures. Highly recommended."

"Nicols is certainly the most powerful voice here, but she wars her
seniority lightly and with the exception of the ferociously polemical anti-rape
No Now (a deeply uncomfortable listen) she is in remarkably lyrical form.
The three long pieces, Lullaby for Clement, Hymn Indoors and
Coming Out, are the best of the set. Hug's viola us sometimes reduced to
an accompanist's role in the first and last of them, but she finds a stance on
the middle piece and is instrumental in turning it into a thing of real beauty.
Kraabel has her own approach to the instrument and though she is sometimes
reminiscent of Trevor Watts, no one will claim a profound influence. A wonderful
record, and a brave one."

"Gender is a relevant issue here, because many of the qualities that make
for successful improvisation are (stereo)typically female - behaving co-operatively
rather than competitively, listening and responding sensitively to what one hears,
making time and space for the contributions of others… And so it proves here;
the vocals (largely wordless; like an instrument), viola and sax complement each
other well. The music evolves gently, without anyone forcing the issue or trying
to dominate. There are loud and violent passages, but they appear to arise
organically, rather than at the behest of any one of the players. An example comes
in No Now, where a tirade of expletives from Nicols is prefaced by increasingly
harsh sounds from both Hug and Kraabel, so when the outburst comes, it seems natural,
almost inevitable.

This recording session was only the third occasion that the trio played together,
coming just a month after their live debut at last year's Freedom of the City
festival. Given this, they are remarkably sympathetic and coherent, the equal
of far longer established groupings."

"One of the most interesting trio improvisations I've heard lately, this
CD showcases three different talents in a mixture of personalities resulting in
a cohesive, coherent musical exploration. Maggie Nicols' voice gives birth to a
constantly shifting palette of colours, extracting any single nuance you can get
in a tone or in just a 'vocal gesture'; Caroline Kraabel uses her sax trying to
counterpoint as perfectly as one can do - without having a score in front of her
- with noteworthy technique and inventiveness; Charlotte Hug brings a spicy, '20th
century' Webernian aroma to the concoction, defining this music with a character
that's all its own. Great interplay and never a dull moment in almost one hour
of music, I'd like to hear more from this formation."